As the insignia went on, the gloves came off, as truckloads of soldiers moved swiftly to claim total control of the semi-autonomous peninsula, Ukraine’s only province with a majority of citizens of Russian descent.

A bloodless coup. A counter-revolution within a revolution. And, on the surface at least, a day of giddy liberation for pro-Russian Crimeans, who welcomed the occupation of their corner of Ukraine with flowers and cheers.

“Russia! Russia!” was the fierce, echoing chant here in the regional capital of Simferopol, where a crowd of more than 1,000 marched in celebration. The Russian tricolour was everywhere, one flag so large it spanned the entire width of the street, held aloft by more than a dozen people.

By mid-afternoon, clusters of heavily armed soldiers could be seen in more than a dozen downtown locations — many, though not all, showing the blue, red and white stripes of Russia.

The welcome was not unanimous. Simferopol, the travel gateway to Crimea’s coastal resorts, is two-thirds Russian. The remaining third — Ukrainians and Muslim Tatars with a five-century claim to the region — remained indoors, hunkered down in dread.

The set-piece military operation in Crimea received the rapid endorsement of the Kremlin, where the Russian Parliament handed President Vladimir Putin “the full arsenal of means” to mobilize in Crimea, and possibly beyond to other parts of eastern and southern Ukraine with significant Russian populations.

A diplomatic frenzy ensued, with Barack Obama and Putin spending 90 minutes on the phone Saturday, less than a day after the U.S. president warned “there will be costs” to direct military intervention in Ukraine.

In Kyiv, the interim Ukrainian leadership whose hold on power is less than a week old warned Russia it viewed the intervention as an act of war. (It put the military on high alert.) Moscow, for its part, did not return Kyiv’s calls.

The developments came as grim reality for those citizens in Crimea who side with the fledgling Ukrainian revolution.

“Imagine how you would feel if Great Britain popped out of nowhere to take away half the land of Canada,” Eugene Novitsky, leader of the EuroMaidan protests in Simferopol, remarked caustically to the Star.

“We are dealing with one of the most powerful militaries in the world with our government at its most vulnerable — only days old and already confronting a terrible economic crisis,” said Novitsky. “Our Ukrainian units in Crimea are surrounded by Russian troops. We now face what feels like a permanent threat from the new imperialistic, chauvinistic Russia.”

There is an ironic etymology to Crimea’s two most important cities. Simferopol, the capital, is based on the Greek world for “usefulness.” And Sebastopol, the coastal home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, translates to “Emperorville.”

Beyond Crimea, tense pro-Russian protests played out in eastern and southern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk and the southern port of Odessa, some leading to scuffles with supporters of Ukraine’s new government.

But the more immediate worries centred on Crimea, where any outbreak of violence involving Russian soldiers on the ground could come with ominous consequences.

Refat Chubarov, head of Crimea’s 300,000-strong Tatar population, urged his people to stay home and not resist the Russians.

“Literally hours remain until catastrophe,” he told a Russian radio outlet, according to BBC Monitoring.

In the Crimean port of Balaclava, local residents stood as human shields between Ukrainian and Russian armed personnel, according to a statement from the Ukrainian Border Guard Service. “The situation is tense to the limit.”

Other reports late Saturday indicated the Ukrainian navy was removing its assets and personnel to Odessa, ceding its own ground to Russian forces in a bid to avoid bloodshed.

Within Ukraine, a standoff of a political kind worsened, with Crimea’s newly created, pro-Russian government announcing it would move forward a planned referendum on greater autonomy, with the vote coming March 30 instead of May 25, when Ukraine is set for nationwide elections.

Kyiv, meanwhile, announced the regional government was itself illegal, having been launched not only under gunpoint earlier this week but also without the necessary quorum of regional parliament.

The lone glimmer in Saturday’s developments, albeit a dim one, was the announcement that former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was released from prison a week ago after the fall of Viktor Yanukovych’s regime, would travel to Moscow Monday to meet Putin.

Tymoshenko, once regarded as a hero in Ukraine for co-leading 2004’s ultimately failed Orange Revolution, has a history of successfully managing the fraught relationship with Russia.

But for many Ukrainians — perhaps even the vast majority — who endured three winter months in Kyiv’s Independence Square for a fresh start for Ukraine, Tymoshenko is now seen as every bit as inculcated in the culture of corruption as the now fugitive Yanukovych.

For them, if the price of Tymoshenko solving the crisis with Russia is having to accept a new Tymoshenko government in Ukraine, the entire effort will have been for naught.